PAJU, South Korea — On the outskirts of this town north of Seoul, a hillside has been razed to create a lawn the size of a football field. At the top of the lawn lie the tombs of two famous Koreans: a 12th-century general and, several meters up the slope and hidden behind a white granite and tiled-roof wall, a 17th-century prime minister.

For tourists who pull off the nearby highway about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles from the capital, and to the children who scamper up the manicured turf, this hill is more than a quick pleasant weekend hike - it is the site of the oldest family feud in South Korea. It is a place where ancestral worship and the mystic art of feng shui - Asian geomancy - still grip the modern-day Korean imagination.

To laymen, the hill looks like many other hills in this mountainous county dotted with Buddhist temples, military barracks and golf courses. But to experienced eyes of feng shui experts, the place is pulsing with special energy, guarded by a twisting blue dragon to the left and a crouching white tiger to the right. It is an energy, they say, that promises good luck for the family whose ancestor is buried there.

The descendants of the general, Yoon Gwan, and the minister, Shim Ji Won, have fought over the propitious site for 300 years, suing each other for violating their forefather's sacred resting place, clashing in violence and even defying exile and death.

A king tried and failed to mediate. The Yoons and Shims, who respectively number one million and 250,000 in this country of 48 million people, once banned and still discourage marriage between their children.

"Not even over my dead body!" says 77-year-old Yoon Bu Hyun, a leader of the Yoon clan. "You tell me," he says. "Would you marry your son to the daughter of your sworn enemy?"

Feng shui, which means "wind and water" in Chinese and is called poongsu in Korean, dictates that one's destiny is shaped by the natural surroundings. It has numerous followers in Asia, where people call in geomancers before deciding on the sites for new homes and factories.

But in South Korea, where the Confucian tradition of ancestor worship dominates family rituals, it holds a special appeal. Many families carefully choose a grave site when a parent dies. Some go to the trouble of relocating the remains of long-dead relatives when a spell of bad luck, like death and bankruptcies, is attributed to an ancestor's jinxed burial site.

"A good grave site brings good luck to descendants. If you bury your dead ancestor in a good place and take good care of it, you feel good. This is the most basic mentality for Koreans," says Kim Soo Han, head of Korea Poongsu Association. "Likewise a bad site dooms a family, plagued by misfortunes."

Modern-day critics deride grave site poongsu as superstitious and detrimental to the environment. From the air, the verdant hills appear pockmarked with elaborate grave sites.

Avoiding the cumbersome task of grooming the family graveyard, many sons now bury their relatives in public cemeteries, which are running out of space, or choose cremation, as the government urges.

But poongsu holds sway over the Korean rich and powerful. Although they are loath to admit it in public, politicians often relocate their ancestral tombs before elections. A former president, Kim Dae Jung, a devout Roman Catholic, won the 1997 election, his fourth attempt at presidency, after moving his parents' graves to a site chosen by a famous geomancer who had predicted the 1994 death of Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, by inspecting what was said to be the tomb site of Kim's ancestor.

"I know a politician, a graduate of Harvard University, who has moved his parents' graves eight times, almost once a year, hoping that will bring him election or a cabinet post," said Jee Jong Hag, who runs a poongsu Web site. "He moved those tombs so often that the rest of his family lost track of them. The last time I heard of him, he was still waiting for a cabinet post."

Poongsu experts speak in rich and often confusing symbolism. They compare propitious topography to "a black tortoise crawling back to the sea after burying her eggs in the sand," "a red phoenix coming down for a rest," or "an aging dragon looking back at its birthplace." And their auguries vary widely.

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But when Samsung Electronics consulted a geomancer for its shop displays, or when the government hired an army of poongsu experts before deciding on a new administrative complex, or when children sing school anthems extolling how their school is endowed with the energy of a nearby mountain, or when old people decide on their burial grounds in advance and often visit there, they are not so much succumbing to the ghosts of superstition as asserting their sense of traditional values.

The tradition lives on in Korean idiom. When a person is prone to boasting but does not take responsibility, people quip: "When things go well, he praises himself. When things go bad, he blames his ancestors."

Meanwhile, with the presidential election just a year and a half away, noted geomancers are already roaming the hills to divine the future from the ancestral tombs of potential candidates. It's a risky affair, given the fluidity of South Korean politics, and the magi couch their predictions in ifs and buts.

"The site can produce another president," Kim says about Park Geun Hye, daughter of the late President Park Chung Hee and potential candidate for the December 2007 election. "But there is a problem."

He says Park's fortune will probably be determined by how a two-meter-tall, or six-foot-high, rock near her grandfather's tomb in the provincial town of Kumi, in central South Korea, affects the site's spiritual energy.

Like the tombs of the ancestors of presidents, tycoons and other notable Koreans, the graves of Yoon Gwan and Shim Jae Won attract regular crowds of geomancers, both amateur and professional. Armed with a compass, maps and divining rods, they gingerly walk around the grave mounds, scan the lay of the surrounding hills with a knowing nod, and ruminate over the relationship between the site and the destiny of the families.

In ancient Korea, grave site disputes were the most common cause of lawsuits. Among those disputes, the Shim- Yoon quarrel is the most famous unresolved case, partly because it involved families that each produced several queens and numerous ministers at the royal court.

Yoon Gwan, who expanded Korea's northern territories, died in 1111 and was buried in this hill. But the tomb was lost as continuous wars ravaged the country and his family's power declined. When Shim Ji Won, the prime minister, died in 1662, his family buried him in the same hill.

The feud erupted in the mid-18th century when the Yoon clan, with its influence on the rise again, rediscovered the general's grave - as it turned out, only meters downhill from Shim's.

Petitions and clashes followed. King Young Jo presided over a hearing in 1764 and ordered the clans to respect the two graves as they were. But the families continued to bicker, vandalizing each other's tombs, and the irate king punished the 70-year-old patriarchs of the rival factions by flogging and exiling them. One of them, a Yoon, died from the effects of the beating. Animosity only deepened.

In April, the clans made headlines when they agreed to donate part of the Yoons' hill so the Shims could expand their family cemetery on an adjacent hill and move the minister's grave there. They said the deal was not being driven by greed, but "feared our filial faithfulness for our ancestors may be misunderstood by others" because of the prolonged dispute.

"We thought it was time to end the feud. Our compromise will set an example for similar disputes in other families," said Shim Jong Hyuk, secretary general of the Shim clan office.

But a provincial cultural heritage committee intervened.

"They cannot move the tombs at their whim. The old tombs are designated as cultural assets of the nation," said Chung Eui Jong at the Gyeonggi Provincial Administration. "Besides, the long family feud is part of our nation's unique culture. The tombs should remain as they are as evidence to that history."

The families are appealing the ruling, and the centuries-old feud remains unresolved.